that a child may write them.
Isaiah 10:19
I
was standing in the dimly lit stairwell of the first floor in my building. It was the size of a single prison cell. And my mother Ann was standing next to me.
I had followed her out of the house to make sure she was okay. She had just been punched in the face by my stepfather Buck,
for disappearing for three days and coming back home without money. She claimed he had broken her jaw. This, however, did not stop her from pulling
out a crack pipe and getting high.
Back in 1985, a crack pipe looked like a glass drinking straw with
burnt edges. A more affordable type of method
was the homemade “quarter water” pipe. The
folks from my hood, one of the toughest areas in the Bronx, right outside of
Hunt’s Point, they called it “quarter water” because it was made out of the
container for the twenty-five-cent juice that was affordable and quenched one’s
thirst on a dry, hot summer day (also known as "hug juice"). This juice famous to children became the tool
Mommy used to get high. Mommy would
march to the local Spanish roach-infested bodega, walk straight to the back of
the store, open the refrigerator, and grab a quarter water. It was a round plastic container. Aluminum foil concealed the juice. Since it only cost twenty-five cents, she
wouldn’t even wait on line to pay for it.
She would walk right up to the register, slap a “case quarter” down on
the counter, and leave.
Standing in the stairwell on the lower step that day, I looked up
and watched my beat-up mother take the back of her earring and punch tiny holes
in one side of the aluminum-foil top. After
that, she let me suck seventy-five percent of the juice out of the container. Then she took a clear BIC glass-like pen,
pulled out the ink stick, and punched a hole through the belly of the container. She lit a cigarette. The light from the fire shined on her nails. They were bitten down to the base. She sucked in that nicotine that gave her
pleasure for years but caused the color of her teeth to be mustard-yellow, then
put the burnt ashes on top of the tiny little holes punched into the aluminum
foil. Next she planted the crack on top
of the hot ashes. It looked like very
small pebbles. The light from a distant
window in the hallway reflected on one side of her face. I could make out parts of her beaten face. Blue-black swelling puffed her skin and made
her eyes appear twice their normal size.
I watched Mommy take her lighter and set the crack ablaze. I could hear it crackle. I saw the smoke building up inside the
container. The crack had a sweet but
funky odor, kind of like someone who gets up in the morning and without taking
a shower, puts on sweet perfume. The
stench began to dominate the familiar fragrance of the hallway.
I stood there looking at what had appeared to be Mommy, but now
seemed like a totally different person. She
took a long pull and then she stared at me.
It didn’t seem like she was looking at me, instead she gazed straight
through me. It was as if something or
someone was in the hallway behind me. I
looked around and saw no one. It was
just Mommy and I. Her whole personality
changed in a matter of seconds. She
turned into a zombie right before my eyes.
Her eyes were wide open and her pupils dilated. She became anxious and seemed focused on
something nonexistent. The woman whom I
loved as Mommy was deviant. She became a
stranger to me. She didn’t even look
like Mommy anymore. I was a skinny kid,
but she appeared to be just as skinny as me.
She weighed around eighty-five pounds. Her skin was dry and discolored. Her face was so sunken that her eyes looked
as though they were going to jump right out of her skull. As the long seconds passed by, I began to
feel alone and afraid. After about a
minute or two of staring at me, she offered me a hit.
“No thank you,” I said,
shocked that my own mother was asking me, at nine years old, to smoke crack. I knew at that moment that her mind was
really gone.
She tried again. "Come
on, take a hit, smoke it.”
I looked her straight in the eyes.
"No, Mommy, I don't want to.”
She looked into my eyes and moved the homemade pipe towards me. “Are you sure? It’s good.”
I looked down at the steps and whispered, “No, thank you.”
Suddenly,
I realized our roles had reversed. I no
longer could make excuses for Mommy or depend on her to protect me. I had to become an adult. I had to discover a means to guard my life,
and to protect Mommy from herself. I turned to the streets, and the
neighborhood was my dwelling
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